Logo_white_on_blue-min

Blogs

Filter by Date Period

Select Date
Filter by Date Range
Filter by Date Range

Filter by Category

Filter by Category

Management link cutover

"I've always believed there are moments in our lives which can be defined as a transition between the before and after, between the cause and the effect." Benjamin X. Wretlind. Many of you will be familiar with the after-hours or overnight cutovers where you make changes to your organisation's infrastructure (eg applications, servers, networks, etc) while everyone else is blissfully unaware, curled up sleeping in bed.…

Read More »
11/06/2014 No Comments

Telefónica Selects Amdocs in Chile and Peru

Telefónica Selects Amdocs Products and Services for Quad-Play Transformation in Chile and Peru. Amdocs announced that Telefónica, one of the world's leading service providers with more than 313 million customers across Latin America and Europe, has selected Amdocs for transformation projects in Chile and Peru. By modernizing and standardizing Telefónica's business support systems (BSS) on Amdocs software, Telefónica subscribers in these countries will be able to…

Read More »
10/06/2014 No Comments

Zain Kuwait Selects IBM

Zain Kuwait Selects IBM Social Software to Enhance Customer Digital Experience. IBM announced that Zain, the pioneer of mobile telecommunications in Kuwait, has chosen IBM’s social software to deliver deeper, more personalized experiences for its 2.5 million customers in the country. The IBM solution brings together Zain’s digital, mobile and social platforms to offer customers a single, compelling point of engagement. Founded in 1983 as Kuwait’s…

Read More »
10/06/2014 No Comments

Are you asking the right questions?

"Big data is currently at the peak of the hype curve, and while service providers can collect more data than ever from many different sources they don't always know what to do with it. Valuable insights are often missed simply because they aren't asking the right questions of the right data to generate useful intelligence." Patrick Tan on TelecomAsia. Big data is often used for identifying…

Read More »
10/06/2014 No Comments

Sweating the OSS vendor

"No matter how good you are at planning, the pressure never goes away. So I don't fight it. I feed off it. I turn pressure into motivation to do my best." Benjamin Carson. Over the years, I've seen many a customer put pressure on the vendor (ie sweat the vendor) to do tasks that aren't necessarily contracted, with the customer using the catch-all claim of "the…

Read More »
09/06/2014 No Comments

Huawei separates OSS from Managed Services

Huawei Launches OSS Solution independently from Managed Services. Huawei announced that its Operations Support System (OSS) solution is commercially available to all service providers. As the OSS was previously only available as part of Huawei’s Managed Services, the extended availability of the solution further strengthens Huawei’s service portfolio and the company’s position as a global operations transformation partner. Since 2005, Huawei has aggressively expanded its services…

Read More »
06/06/2014 No Comments

How to make your APIs better

"APIs are everywhere today and can be a great building block of modern applications. But all too often APIs are not truly great. Rather than love your API, developers curse it." John Musser in relation to this slide deck. Yesterday's post was about the importance of having an API that's easy to integrate with for the positive word-of-mouth that it delivers (as opposed to the potentially…

Read More »
06/06/2014 No Comments

NetCracker transforms Turk Telecom BSS

NetCracker Next-Generation Revenue Management Solution Rapidly Transforms BSS for Turk Telecom. NetCracker Technology announced that Turk Telecom has completed a major BSS transformation in just seven months utilizing NetCracker’s next-generation Revenue Management solution as its strategic platform for service enablement and systems consolidation. Turk Telecom is Turkey’s leading communications provider. This BSS transformation, supporting Turk Telecom’s substantial fixed-line business, has replaced three legacy billing platforms with…

Read More »
05/06/2014 No Comments

Comptel integrates with Smallworld

Comptel Integrates GE’s Inventory Software Solutions to Streamline Telecom Service Fulfilment. Comptel Corporation and GE announced that they have joined forces to help communications service providers (CSPs) federate access to the large amount of data split across physical and logical inventory systems. By enabling service orchestration to reach beyond logical inventory, operators can ensure reliable, accurate and efficient service delivery, decrease costs resulting from “truck rolls”…

Read More »
05/06/2014 No Comments

Does your API open doors?

"Remember: An API is a journey, not a destination" John Musser in this slide-deck entitled "Ten Reasons Developers Hate Your API". API (Application Programming Interface) are the mechanisms for getting data into and out of your OSS. Since an OSS doesn't do anything useful without data, APIs are effectively the life-blood of an OSS. Yet, APIs seem to almost be an afterthought for some OSS and…

Read More »
05/06/2014 No Comments

MTN Selects CSG International

MTN Selects CSG for Comprehensive Managed Services Program. CSG International announced that MTN, one of the largest communication service providers in the world, has selected CSG for a long-term managed services engagement that will enable MTN South Africa to simplify and streamline its operations and focus its resources on core business lines. Under the terms of the multiyear agreement, CSG will provide end-to-end management of the…

Read More »
04/06/2014 No Comments

The components of SDN, NFV, MANO & OSS

When you curate a website / blog called PassionateAboutOSS, it's pretty obvious that you would see the world through OSS-tinted glasses. The tech-world at least. And so it has been for me when evaluating new comms network / service concepts like SDN / NFV. It's been a case of, "that all sounds really exciting and great for network engineers, but how will it help the OSS…

Read More »
04/06/2014 3 Comments

The marriage analogy

"Don't marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can't live without." James C. Dobson. A reader recently asked a great question about vendor lock-in. OSS tend to be very sticky (ie it's very hard to change suppliers once an OctopOSS's tentacles have spread throughout the CSP's operations) so vendor lock-in is always a risk that terrorises CSPs. OSS relationships…

Read More »
03/06/2014 No Comments

Interruption is the enemy of productivity

"Interruption is the enemy of productivity." Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson in Rework. OctopOSS are tightly entangled beasts. There are so many complexities that collaboration with your fellow project members is essential. But too many OSS projects get bogged down due to different forms of communications - meetings, documentation, conferences, chatting with colleagues and so on. As the team from 37signals indicates in the quote…

Read More »
02/06/2014 No Comments

What got you here…

"When times get confusing, it's easy to revert to the habits that got you here. More often than not, that's precisely the wrong approach. The very thing that got you here is the thing that everyone who's here is doing, and if that's what it took to get to the next level, no one would be stuck." Seth Godin in his blog. For all of us…

Read More »
30/05/2014 No Comments

Maxcom Selects NetCracker

Maxcom Selects NetCracker to Transform OSS for Quad-Play Services. NetCracker Technology announced that Maxcom, an integrated, quad-play communications service provider serving key metropolitan markets in Mexico, has selected NetCracker to deliver a large-scale OSS transformation that will radically improve its order-to-cash process and network design, build and optimization capabilities. Maxcom provides voice, high-speed Internet, mobile and pay-TV services to residential and business customers in key urban…

Read More »
30/05/2014 No Comments

Is marketing an OSS driver?

"Marketing is now a fundamental driver of IT purchasing, and that trend shows no signs of stopping –or even slowing down –any time soon. In fact, Gartner analyst Laura McLellan recently predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than their counterpart CIOs." Lisa Arthur on Forbes. According to Gartner’s research: 2011 B2B and B2C marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue were almost…

Read More »
29/05/2014 No Comments

The debt analogy

"Arrange your list of debts from smallest to largest (making sure you’re meeting the minimum repayments on each). Here’s the trick: attack your smallest debt (say your credit card) by bumping up the repayments, so you can knock it over like a domino as quickly as possible. When it’s paid in full, throw your card into a blender (or have a bill burning ceremony). Then take…

Read More »
28/05/2014 No Comments

More news on Clarity

Subsequent to our recent posts regarding Clarity OSS Ltd, further announcements have been published to the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), as can be found here: ASX:Code=CYO. In brief, Clarity has reached an agreement to sell off 80% of subsidiary Clarity Malaysia and has agreed to terms with a secured creditor, to be paid by 31 May 2014. Clarity has now resumed trading on the ASX.

Read More »
27/05/2014 No Comments

Project sponsor obligations

"If the primary aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever." Thomas Aquinas. As we all know, OSS projects can be complex behemoths that have as many people-related issues as technically-related issues. More so than on most projects, OSS project sponsors need to be involved. They can't just be figurehead leaders and leave the project to others. They…

Read More »
27/05/2014 No Comments

Ohh, and don’t forget the customer contracts

"I don't understand this irony - valuable things like cars, gold, diamond are made up of hard materials but most valuable things like money, contracts and books are made up of soft paper." Amit Kalantri. When planning out a new OSS project, I generally focus on three things first: People (who is involved, who will be impacted, what training will be required, what corporate relationships /…

Read More »
26/05/2014 No Comments